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What is a digital lending platform?

When I tell people that QCash is a digital lending platform, they often ask what I mean by that. Here are a few highlights:

In short, a digital lending platform like QCash leverages social, mobile, data analytics and the cloud to create a lending process that’s efficient for the financial institution and easy for the borrower.

When we first started developing the QCash small dollar lending platform, there was a lot of paper involved. We knew we had to do better because all around us, mobile was exploding and so-called fintech companies were focusing on new ways to harness data analytics and the cloud.

These fintechs were focused on tapping into social capabilities. We looked at that and said, “That’s something we need to emulate. We need to bring that into our product if we’re going to make it affordable, scalable and be able to adapt and evolve in a way driven by the future needs of our members.” Because of this, we chose to prioritize the cloud and mobile financial technology.

For the first few years, this product lost money. Not very many of our members at WSECU used it. It was too much of a hassle in its earlier iterations. There were two primary causes of this:

1. A lot of people were involved. This overloaded the process and made us realize we needed a more automated system. 2. It was a long process that required quite a bit of back and forth between the member and our staff.

Because of this long process, we began to evolve the platform to be much more streamlined. We did this through the establishment of further automated underwriting processes. This, in turn, cut out the need for so much employee involvement.

Essentially, that’s how I characterize a digital lending platform. Its focuses are social, mobile analytics and the cloud. When you get all of these working in concert, you can create a system that truly benefits both the credit union and its members.